Wearing My Smile | ✔

Friday, March 30th, 2007

You had been gone for days.

You'd never done that anymore, not after the first time. You hadn't been to school. You weren't anywhere we used to go to. You weren't at home. You weren't with those guys at school. You were nowhere.

The last few weeks before then we hadn't been talking right. Every conversation turned into fights. Our comfortable silence had turned suffocating and I didn't know when that happened, or why.

Perhaps I should have pushed you and asked you where you'd been the first time you'd disappeared. I should have. I should have asked you to show me where so I could come to get you when I needed to, but I was already standing on a thin ice as it was and somehow I knew that if I'd pushed you too hard you'd leave, so I hadn't because I needed you there with me.

“Rumon, get inside. Eat your breakfast first.”

My father had been home for a week for his annual leave, but you hadn't even seen him, Sam. That was why I knew something was wrong. You loved him. Just like me, you held onto the month when he'd be back. I was certain you'd heard about him coming home but then why weren't you there?

I stubbed off my cigarette on the ground and took the filter back with me and walked back inside through the back door. I should have felt awful. I smelled too much of cigarettes I'd been inhaling for all days you'd been away. It wasn't something new. I'd been smoking a lot since that first day I sat with you under that mango tree just so you'd have a company, but I rarely ever smoked in front of my father. I wondered then what he thought of me or if he thought you brought me a bad influence. I wouldn't want him to think that.

“You can't worry about him all the time, Roo,” he started when we began to eat the breakfast. Luce didn't even look up. She had been saying the same thing to me for months.

“I can't just turn it off, Dad,” I insisted. “Sam isn't—you know he isn't the most stable person around.”

“He isn't, but neither are you.” When I tried to protest, he held up a hand to stop me. “I know you both are really close. I know you love him. But how was your session with the therapist I'd told you about? When was the last time you play with other people who isn't him? Or do something that is not related to him?”

The conversation was a mirror of one we'd had ages ago and I didn't know why it irritated me, but I told him calmly, “I still do still life and landscape photography. I hang out with Penny and my other friends.”

“Outside the school?”

“Maybe not outside, but—”

“Roo,” he told me kindly, “you can't set a person as your whole world.”

I bristled at his words. I hated that. Hated that he thought he could come home and lecture how I wanted to live my life when he wasn't even around for most of it. I wanted to shout at him, saying that in all the times he hadn't been there, you were. But I kept my mouth shut because I also hated that I wasn't being fair to him. I knew he loved his job and I knew deep down he was right.

I almost jumped when he rested his hand on top of mine. I looked up at him, seeing him for the first time, the exhaustion, the concern; the years that hadn't been kind to him. In his face I could see myself, weary by life, hanging on by the thread. He said, “I'm sorry, son.”

I swallowed. “What for?”

“Because I hadn't been here when you'd needed me most. For leaving all the time. For what it did to you.”

And I knew, I knew he wasn't just saying about him leaving after a month, Sam, he was apologizing for the first absence after my mother's death. I couldn't blink away the blur in my eyes because my tears came unbidden with how much I'd missed him in all the years he'd been gone so I sobbed into my hands until I felt strong arms around my shoulders and surrounded by the flower-scented shampoo Luce liked to use.

There inside my dining room, in the arms of my only two family members, I felt as if I'd been freed from the shackles I'd been wearing all my life. Then, like everything else in my life, I thought of you, Sam.

Back in our seats, I heard Luce saying, “He'll come home when he's ready.”

I would've believed her if it had been some other times before, but I didn't know why I couldn't then.